Education after the Elections
Dialogue with the world around us (Pope Francis)
We do well to recall the words of the Second Vatican Council: “The joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well” (Gaudium et Spes, 1). Here we find the basis for our dialogue with the contemporary world.
Responding to the existential issues of people today, especially the young, listening to the language they speak, can lead to a fruitful change, which must take place with the help of the Gospel, the magisterium, and the Church’s social doctrine. The scenarios and the areopagi involved are quite varied. For example, a single city can contain various collective imaginations which create “different cities”. If we remain within the parameters of our “traditional culture”, which was essentially rural, we will end up nullifying the power of the Holy Spirit. God is everywhere: we have to know how to find him in order to be able to proclaim him in the language of each and every culture; every reality, every language, has its own rhythm. ... That is why I like saying that the position of missionary disciples is not in the centre but at the periphery: they live poised towards the peripheries… including the peripheries of eternity, in the encounter with Jesus Christ. In the preaching of the Gospel, to speak of “existential peripheries” decentralizes things; as a rule, we are afraid to leave the centre. The missionary disciple is someone “off centre”: the centre is Jesus Christ, who calls us and sends us forth. The disciple is sent to the existential peripheries.
The Church is an institution, but when she makes herself a “centre”, she becomes merely functional, and slowly but surely turns into a kind of NGO. The Church then claims to have a light of her own, and she stops being that “mysterium lunae” of which the Church Fathers spoke. She becomes increasingly self-referential and loses her need to be missionary. From an “institution” she becomes a “enterprise”. She stops being a bride and ends up being an administrator; from being a servant, she becomes an “inspector”. Aparecida wanted a Church which is bride, mother and servant, more a facilitator of faith than an inspector of faith.The Common Good (Lorenzo Albacete)
Historically, the state/society opposition originates in disagreement about whether or not political systems should be founded on the principle of the common good. Modern political thought rejected this principle because it opened the door to the authority of the Church’s claim to represent the highest good, namely, eternal salvation. While the Church may insist that the organization of political life is not its mission, the salvation it proclaims depends on human behavior in this world, leading the Church to claim an authority to judge the policies of governments from this perspective. (Remember that according to the Church’s teaching, the state is a natural institution willed by the Creator himself to play a positive part in human destiny.) In order to avoid this impasse, modern political thought preferred to embrace, as its point of departure, not the good sought by men and women, but the evil that stands in the way of the good sought, leaving each individual the right to choose his or her own good. The unity of society promoted by the state was thus defined in negative terms. The vitality of social institutions, based on the pursuit of a common good, took second place to the elimination of threats to individual choice. No wonder that, commenting on a current book about the decline in membership in voluntary associations throughout the United States, a reviewer acknowledged that in order to obtain certain individual freedoms highly valued today, it is worthwhile to pay the price of the loss of “social texture.” In our dialogue with modern political thought, it is necessary to insist that the Catholic notion of the “common good” does not open the door to ecclesiastical interference with the political process. In our view, politics is part of culture, and culture is the expression of the “fundamental desires of the heart.” These are the same for all human persons. Indeed, fidelity to the “common good” means confidence in this universality of the desires of the heart. What we require of the state is openness to the quest for fulfillment of the human desire for beauty, happiness, freedom, and truth. The impetus for this quest is what we call the “religious sense,” and understood in this way, it poses no political threat to the state’s authority or to the unity of a multicultural society.
